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If you will permit a bit more discussion of the cover before we open the book, I will begin my comments with the praise Matches has received. On the front cover, there is one blurb. It is by Dave Eggers, which surprised me; Eggers is not a name I would associate with Kaufman's fans. "But that's cool," I thought, "Cross-pollination, the publishers want Kaufman to break into a new audience." Eggers comments:
"Alan Kaufman is not for everyone. He's strange. This is strange writing. He would be clobbered in most writing workshops. He's not neat, he's not careful, and he goes overboard all over the place. But there's more passion here than you see in twenty other books combined, and he's got a lot to say about the enormous amount he's seen. This is a very crucial book to read at a very crucial time."
As I reeled from the idea that that was the best blurb they could get, I flipped to the back cover and read,
"This is an extraordinary war novel. It is unusual, profound, simple, brutal, and idiosyncratic."—David Mamet
There were only two reasons I could think of that the publishers might put a qualified Eggers compliment on the front and unqualified praise by Mamet on the back. Either they had all been replaced by chuckling anti-literary pod people, or the author actually liked the Eggers quote. When I finally and nervously cracked the book, I became increasingly convinced of the latter explanation.
The novel opens with an introduction so profoundly and movingly simple that it seems almost inappropriate to place it in this flip review:
In the Israeli army, a unit commander reporting from the field will refer to the soldiers under his command as "Matches." The term, taken from Hannah Senesh's poem "Blessed Is the Match"—a hymn to valor—is the IDF code word for a soldier. Among the troops, it has come to mean someone who strikes, burns, and dies.
After that violent little left-aligned paragraph, after a table of contents, and after an additional title page, comes a manuscript with the nature of a nightmare. In other words, it is entirely consistent with its own internal logic, and you know, while absorbed in the novel, that the characters cannot wake up.
Like most nightmares, the novel begins ridiculously, with a four-page prologue with a baroque, decorative language that, after that taut realist introduction, disorients the reader:
The air reeked of camel shit and dread. My sleepless eyes drifted shut: on their side six shot, no telling how many dead, and from our end two wounded, bad, and one, curly-headed Reuvi, the newlywed, bagged for a grave. Only twenty-four he was, a boy. A mob-tossed hand grenade mangled his guts. A bad scene.
Through these early pages of convoluted prose emerges a character, an ancient Palestinian so omnisciently wise that one can only imagine him voiced by Frank Oz. And when the Israeli solders react to this Yoda-like figure, in the way that they react, the American reader is forced to realize: you, along with your narrator/protagonist Nathan Falk, are completely out of your experience. By the time that you finish the prologue, it should be clear that you know nothing about Israel and Palestine, at all.
As I say, this novel comes with a table of contents, dividing it into four sections. The first section is a collection of anecdotes from Falk's early years in the IDF. Falk is in an anti-terrorist unit1 operating in Gaza. Specifically, he and his fellow soldiers travel from settlement to settlement wherever the IDF suspects a terrorist might be hiding. At a couple of points in the novel, they are sent to stop possible terrorists from entering Israel, but for most of the time, they are hunters. And often, that hunting is done in urban areas. The first anecdote from this section specifically takes place two years after Falk joins the squad, though the others are impossible to place in time—some seem to come before the prologue, some after (assuming the prologue happens in time with the rest of the novel, at all). In that anecdote, after the military characters are established, the squad is sent to the (fictional, I think) Gaza settlement of Neve Pasha, with a warning from their Lieutenant:
"…They were very poor and illiterate, these settlers. Right after the Six Days' War they established Neve Pasha. They have been on the front lines, so to speak, for many years. They are hard people, used to suffering. They have no illusions. They don't trust anyone, not even us. They know that in the name of some agreement with the Palestinans, even the very murderers of their children, we'd sell them out in a minute."
An event which, by the interpretation of many, happened scant months before Matches was released. So when they get to Neve Pasha, and the Israeli settler we meet there, Elchanon, calls Falk a traitor and an Arab, and assures him of the eventual extermination of all left-wing and moderate Jews, it is perhaps more chilling now than when it was written.
Falk is completely incredulous. He schlepped from a safe, opulent life in New York City to one of the most dangerous strips of land on earth, because he believed in Israel's right to exist and was willing to die and kill for it. He cites his uniform, his hard home in Khan Yunis, his mother's flight from the Nazis. And Elchanon simply assures him,
"As it is written in Tanach: 'After the war against the goyim will come the war between the Jews.'"
Clearly, although Falk's unit-mates are doing their best from keeping him from starting a firefight, their sympathies are not with the settler. But when Falk tries to convince them that he would never shoot a Jew, their sympathy for the Yankee stops cold. They explain it very simply: he shoots, you shoot. That's all war is. And for those slices of the world, such as Israel/Palestine, caught in neverending war, that's all life can really be.
From there, the novel spirals out of the psychotic and into the absurd. Falk and his unit-mates routinely solve petty squabbles in ways that, in some places, could put them in front of a firing squad. They expound with great thoroughness on the stupidity of some of their assignments, and the IDF's tactics. They teach us all the ways, in Arabic, one can refer to the cunts of family members. They come up with insults that I've never thought of; insults which, in less violent places, would get one killed. They are unified in their hatred of one another; in their collective madness. I believe this is what many war novels refer to as camaraderie, though Kaufman never uses the word. I certainly don't get the impression that it's pleasant. But as we approach the book's section, a plot slowly develops, to encompass the book's other main character: Bachshi, the Bedu.
The most concrete aspect of Matches is the characterizations. In the prologue, we are given only the names of the soldiers, and we can feel little more than confusion for them. Kaufman's strongest point, though, is the richness of his characterizations, and he quickly dives into them, using the slightest tic on their parts to reveal the latticework of neuroses that keep them ambulatory, giving us a great deal of information with only slight breaks in the action. Lest we become too fond of Falk, Kaufman expounds in detail on his affair with his best friend's wife. Lest we be too forgiving of such an offence, given the cruel chaos of the war scenes, Kaufman expounds in great detail on the lies and manipulations which Falk uses to keep Maya, his adulterous true love, pacified about his military work while fucking the woman who came over to mediate their disputes (most of which revolved around Falk being, in the words of Maya, "…a motherfucking pig! You're not a soldier! You're a fucking policeman! Go-wan, policeman, say loveme darling, you fucking pig!").
Whereas most of the romantic and lovemaking scenes are simply creepy, the triangle scenes are positively obscene. While the Israeli soldiers are shocking in their hatred towards one another, the women are completely over the top, hysterical and shameless as Angela Lansbury on a righteous crusade, surrounding a man as treacherous as any 30's pulp novel.2 Yet even if Kaufman didn't use so many techniques for separating the reader from normalcy, these characters would still ring true. Their passions, lust and kindnesses are as extreme as their cruelties. They are all three completely shameless, to a degree way beyond normal experience3, but their conversations, their shenanigans, while exaggerated, are immediately recognizable to anyone who's tried to make love in times of dehumanizing stress and pain.
But Bacshi is far more significant than the domestic characters. In the book's aforementioned first anecdote, Falk naively expresses a pride in his ability to understand foreign points of view. The first two-thirds of the book revolve largely around disassembling this pride. Kaufman slowly explores the world of the Bedouin, as it pushes up against the world of the Israelis. Naturally, he discusses the mutual racism, a racism to which Falk seems almost completely immune, parrying every insult and attack with charming humor. Baschi's talents for desert tracking and planning are respected by all but the most racist Israelis, but his friendship with Falk runs deep and genuine. Trading jabs that will make every reader squirm with discomfort, they cheerfully wind their way through crimes, chaos, storms of bullets and unyielding horror. And although the foreshadowing builds up very slowly, there's little confusion as to how Bacshi's story will end. And when Bacshi's story finally does end, the reader is, appropriately, completely unsurprised. One can't appreciate the distance between either cultures or genders when one is wasting time in surprise.
After Bacshi's saga, there's an apparent jump in time, and a host of new anecdotes, as the relationship between the Jews and Arabs continues past Falk's seasoning, into an endless future. The book's climax, the destruction of Bacshi's family, is followed by 75 more pages of narrative. The nightmare has now extended past our point of greatest horror, into a slow and hopeless pain. At this point, Falk is a reservist with anti-terrorist and urban fighting expertise. As such, he is the first called up every time there's trouble, every time men have to be moved away from the cities, to the front. Each time he's called up, he logs more experience, often in combat. Thus, he becomes even more likely to be the first called up, next time. No one in Israel or Palestine expects to outlive war, but there is, at this point, almost no chance that Falk will die of old age.
In these later pages, there is nothing in the way of comfort, and precious little in the way of humanity. Women are either talked about in vague anecdote, or they are Arabs; antagonists. Although it is made clear that Falk is still a peacenik, he rarely talks like one. His dreams of peace are no longer ideas, but fantasies. He no longer discusses them with his fellow soldiers. He thinks of them, by himself, creating imaginary Arabic friends to accompany him in his march towards extinguishment. He analyzes his situations, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, with much more care and intelligence than he did previously. But his analyses are almost devoid of philosophy. He observes, chronicles, and wishes. After his failure to save Bacshi, all of the righteousness is completely burned out of him.
The last third of the book, then, "Section Three" and "Section Four," is less about the experience of an American Jew in the IDF, but simply about the experience of the IDF. There are still separate and disparate characters, representing the varying Israeli takes on the conflict (and, as always, well-characterized in their own right). Falk emotionlessly describes a debacle at a checkpoint, as one soldier loses his cool at a presumably innocent Palestinian and other Israelis are called in to prevent chaos. He speaks of the theatrical complaints and protestations of those Palestinians who actually are harboring terrorists. He talks of warrior generals, irrational officers, and the crushed skulls of middle-aged corporals with only slightly more detachment than he describes two soldiers betting on a horse.
Once again, I don't have any idea how accurate these descriptions are. I could compare the novel to other descriptions I've read, but it is absurd to imagine that I'm qualified to judge one description more accurate than another. I can criticize the book's pacing. Clearly, the non-chronological setup and the back and forth anecdotes are deliberate. Generally speaking, they work, in that they create a sense of timeless disorientation. But you lose some of your reader's focus when you put the climax that early in the book. I can praise the battle scenes on aesthetic grounds: they are intense when they need to be, and appropriately nerve-wracking when Falk finds himself enduring hour after hour of danger. I can say that the characters Alan Kaufman creates feel very real to me, an American Jew. I cannot say, as the reading guide in the back of my copy of the book suggests I should be able to, that I have been "informed." I find the idea offensive. This book did exactly, for me, what it should have done. It threw a sharper light on my ignorance.
Every American war novel written by a soldier since The Naked and the Dead has been a rather desperate attempt to describe a situation that is fundamentally alien to those who have never experienced it. Matches is an attempt to describe neverending war, a concept that is completely alien to almost every American, yet one that a great number of Americans not only claim to understand, but claim to have the right to dictate. The reading guide I mentioned includes an essay by Kaufman, "On the Origins of Matches," reproduced here. In it, he speaks of the experience of an IDF veteran in San Francisco, and describes his friends as "liberal-types." He speaks of his frustration during Intifada II, and his worry for his teenage daughter, there in Israel. He says that he wrote Matches for Americans, during a second stint in the IDF, to try to express, in the face of growing anti-Israel sentiment, why he believes in the necessity of a Jewish State. He does not mention whether or not he felt this behavior was largely Phyrric, though I would be very surprised if he did not. Trying to convince Americans to look at more than one side of an issue is almost always futile; every American writer knows that.
Still, there is an almost in there, and writers tend to feel compelled to try.
Kaufman is most famous for co-editing The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and The Outlaw Bible of American Literature. These projects were both enormous. Their broad scope required that Kaufman (and co-editors SA Griffin, and Barney Rosset and Neil Ortenberg, respectively) possessed a great deal of openness to the diverse, and often mutually and deeply hostile, schools of modern American literature. Their scope also meant that both books were sharply criticized from every conceivable direction, and that the editors needed to handle such criticism, which has often been submitted irrationally, with diplomacy. Thus, it is not surprising that Kaufman's essay reads like an all-inclusive invitation. In "On the Origins of Matches," written in his own voice, he seems to be inviting Americans to share in his experience. He seems to be asking American Jews, American Arabs, American Muslims, and anyone else who cares to pick up the book, to attempt to deepen their understanding of the conflict, the Israeli, and the concept of neverending war. He seems to be asking for greater communication and study.
In the American mind, the idea of "study" is inextricably linked with the idea of "expressing one's opinion." One reads so that one can speak with more authority. There's nothing in Kaufman's essay that criticizes that worldview. But, although I might be projecting, it's not the vibe I catch from Nathan Falk, and it's certainly not the suggestion of his Israeli-born unit-mates. Their message to Americans runs more simply. Shut the fuck up.
1 Please accept my apologies for any mistakes I make in military terminology. The book has almost no such terminology, save slang.
2 Sexist? Obviously. War novels should be sexist. If you want to stop reading sexist novels, end war.
3 That's my story and I'm...
Jonathan Penton is the Editor-in-chief of Unlikely 2.0. Check out his bio page.